Tag: gerrymandering

Almost a month ago I wrote about how the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was considering a case involving the state’s heavily gerrymandered US congressional districts, which some have called among the worst in the nation. About a week later the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that the map is in fact so gerrymandered it violates the Pennsylvania Constitution. It ordered the Republican-controlled legislature to create a new, non-gerrymandered map that would have to be approved by the Democratic governor. I did not write up that then Pennsylvanian Republicans appealed to the US Supreme Court—no graphics for that story. That appeal was rejected by Justice Alito, but with only days to spare the state legislature then created this new map and sent in this new one on Friday.

The problem, according to the governor and outside analysts, is that the map is just as gerrymandered as the previous one. Consequently, yesterday the governor rejected the new map and so now the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, working with outside experts in political redistricting, will create a new congressional map for Pennsylvania. Hopefully before May when the state has its first primaries.

But just how do we know that the new map, despite looking different, was just as gerrymandered. Well, the Washington Post plotted the election margins for districts in 2016 using precinct data versus their proposed 2018 map overlaid atop those same precincts. What did they get? Almost identical results. The districts are no longer Goofy Kicking Donald Duck-esque, but they exhibit the same Republican bias of the previous map.

Trying to do the same thing to get a different or the same result?

For the purposes of design, I probably would have dropped the “PA-” labels, as they are redundant since the whole plot examines Pennsylvania congressional districts. I think that, perhaps with a marker, and maybe a line of no-change would go a bit further in more clearly showing how the ultimately rejected map was nearly identical to its previous incarnation.

Credit for the map borders goes to the Pennsylvania state legislature, the version here to the Washington Post Wonkblog. All Wonkblog for the scatterplot.

The last two weeks we twice looked at gerrymandering as it in particular impacted Pennsylvania, notorious for its extreme gerrymandered districts. And now that the state will have to redraw districts to be less partisan, will Pennsylvania usher in a series of court orders from other state supreme courts, or even the federal Supreme Court, to create less partisan maps?

To that specific question, we do not know. But as we get ever closer to the 2020 Census that will lead to new maps in 2021, you can bet we will discuss gerrymandering as a country. Maybe to jumpstart that dialogue, we have a fantastic work by FiveThirtyEight, the Gerrymandering Project.

Since we focus on the data visualisation side of things, I want to draw your attention to the Atlas of Redistricting. This interactive piece features a map of House districts, by default the current map plan. The user can then toggle between different scenarios to see how those scenarios would adjust the Congressional map.

The setup today

If, like me, you live in an area with lots of people in a small space, you might need to see Pennsylvania or New Jersey in detail. And by clicking on the state you can quickly see how the scenarios redraw districts and the probabilities of parties winning those seats. And at the bottom of the map is the set of all House seats colour-coded by the same chance of winning.

But what I really love about this piece is the separate article that goes into the different scenarios and walks the user through them, how they work, how they don’t work, and how difficult they would be to implement. It’s not exactly a quick read, but well worth it, especially with the map open in a separate tab/window.

Overall, a solid set of work from FiveThirtyEight diving deep into gerrymandering.

Credit for the piece goes to Aaron Bycoffe, Ella Koeze, David Wasserman and Julia Wolfe.

Remember how last week I wrote about gerrymandering in Pennsylvania? It was as the State Supreme Court was about to hear a case involving the partisan redistricting in 2011, widely perceived as one of the most egregious examples of gerrymandering in the nation. Well yesterday afternoon the State Supreme Court ruled that yes, Virginia, Pennsylvania was egregiously gerrymandered and the court ordered the state government to redraw the maps ahead of the 2018 midterms.

One of the worst offenders is the state’s 7th district. And if we go back a few years in time, the Washington Post had a nice piece that showed the (d)evolution of said district into the weird abstract art it is today.